Diverted from Dump, 1M Pounds of Peaches a Lifesaver for Food Bank, Farmers

Each season, 90-year-old peach farmer Lewis DeEugenio scales the back of pickup trucks, shaking his head in dismay at the scene before him—hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds of unwanted peaches headed for the trash.

At the same time, thousands of South Jerseyans go hungry each day, unable to afford food or qualify for food stamps.

A new collaboration between six South Jersey farms and the Food Bank of South Jersey will go a long way toward addressing both problems.

The farms and food bank are launching Just Peachy, a plan to turn the excess peaches into a shelf-stable peach salsa. Instead of being destined for the dump, the peaches will be "reclaimed" from the South Jersey farms that use Glassboro’s Eastern ProPak packing facility.

After prepping at the packing facility, the peaches will be transported to Camden, where Campbell Soup will produce the salsa for free, with an expected 63,000-69,000 jars this year. Proceeds from every jar sold feed the Food Bank of South Jersey's coffers. 

Add in the environmental benefits of sparing the trucking and landfill costs of throwing away the perfectly good peaches, and the project is “win-win-win,” said Audrey Rowe, national administrator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A USDA and Food Bank of South Jersey delegation toured Summit City Farms in Glassboro this week to learn more about the project and meet some of the people behind it.

“This is so innovative and I certainly see potential for this project to be replicated around the country,” Rowe said. “It’s addressing both the farmers’ and the food bank’s needs. We know that local farmers already donate to food banks, but this takes it one step further by creating a revenue stream for the food bank.”

That funding is vital, said Valerie Traore, CEO of the Food Bank of South Jersey, as more South Jerseyans than ever rely on food aid to survive. The food bank serves 170,000 people each month in Camden, Burlington, Gloucester and Salem counties.

“As a nonprofit organization, we always have a need to increase funding so we can help the people who need it,” Traore said. “As more people need our services, there just never seems to be enough food.”

So why then are up to 1 million pounds of peaches and other fruit thrown away between the six participating Just Peachy farms? Because they’re “seconds”—fruit not considered big enough or perfect enough for local supermarkets. It’s not cost-effective for large-scale farms to set up roadside stands to sell the fruit, especially during the nonstop harvesting season, which runs from July to September.

And while farmers do donate food directly to food banks, produce like the delicate, bruise-prone peaches don’t always reach recipients fast enough before rotting.

Watching the peaches go to waste is the “saddest thing for us to see,” said Anthony Yula, Summit City Farm’s manager. With Just Peachy, Yula hopes his grandfather-in-law DeEugenio has less reason to shake his head in disgust this summer over the truckloads of “seconds.”

“We want these peaches eaten. We want them to reach people,” said Yula, whose family farms 500 acres of peach and other fruit trees. “But supermarkets want huge peaches with no imperfections. There’s no reason for these peaches to be thrown away except for the fact that we can’t sell them if they have the tiniest bruise.”

Just Peachy will circumvent peaches’ short shelf life by creating the more shelf-stable peach salsa instead. Details on which grocery stores and farmers markets will sell the salsa aren’t finalized yet.

The project represents everything the USDA stands for, Rowe said.

“This gets healthy food into the marketplace, it helps the hungry and it helps our farmers,” she said approvingly while surveying a peach tree grove. “I love the creativity happening here. This is something I can definitely take back to Washington, D.C., and talk about.”